Melbourne Art Fair, 2025

Across a gothic dreamscape, the images of The Burning, have no sharp focus - bordering on the intangible, they change like moving sand when viewed from different angles and in different light. With other-worldly hues, and a film of dirt, a mist stirs in the burning landscape. Images struggle to stay together - they fall apart on the edge of evaporation.

It is a Wild West, a frontier. A woman in a Victorian era black dress is out for revenge. A shirtless youth grins in the shadows.

With a simmering intensity, the story reveals itself in the dark.

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“Some time back, I travelled with a small photo crew to one of my Indigenous family’s ancestral areas looking for locations to stage a new photo drama using myself and actors… The locations I uncovered were visually featureless - meaning no great dramatic mountain range, forests or even a decent desert-scape - I only found endless dry brown scrub. In a sense, the plainness of the location and the dirt triggered my fictional open-ended narrative. I attempted to ‘fill it in’ as if to paint across a blank canvas.”

- Tracey Moffatt, 2024